Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin Read Free Book Online

gotten hold of a good police source? Why hadn’t he gotten further with the part about neo-Nazis and the Æsir faith—it was day four now, after all. And why, why, why hadn’t he gotten an interview with Erik Hall himself?
    Impossible?
    Really? Well, this morning that diver sat on a
TV sofa
and told them about everything that happened. So it really couldn’t be completely impossible, could it?
    The intern had sat there staring at his coffee mug and hadn’t daredto say anything, fearing that his voice would break. In the end even the lady with the smoker’s cough from the family pages had joined in and declared how embarrassing it was that an inexperienced intern had been put on the country’s hottest story, and that she’d heard that even the free papers in the Stockholm subway had produced more unique information about the Æsir murder.
    “And they don’t even have their own
reporter
on site here in Falun,” she had concluded.
    After he’d slunk away from the morning meeting, the intern had shut the door to his own office and fallen into his swivel chair. He felt like he was going to throw up. Reluctantly he realized that he should probably give up, and went to go tell the news director.
    The director was on the balcony smoking. When he saw the intern walking toward him, he held up a small piece of blue paper against the glass. On the paper was a scribbled telephone number. The news director’s mouth let out a puff of smoke and then formed one word: “Call.”
    The intern sat dejectedly at the edge of the desk, pulled the beige push-button phone out of the mess, and dialed the number. After a few rings, a sharp, piercing voice answered.
    “So
you
were the one who wrote the article in today’s
Dalakuriren
? Well, you can expect anything at all from the evening papers … but that our own
morning paper
would start speculating about murders and Nazism and pagan rituals and I don’t know what else … that is truly deplorable.”
    The intern mumbled something about how it was unfortunate that the reader thought so, but there
were
those lines about Niflheim and Náströndu and not least, a murdered guy in a mine.
    “A ‘guy,’ you say,” said the surly voice.
    “Yes, that part in particular is something the police have made quite clear,” said the intern.
    “Now, it just so happens that I
know
someone who has actually seen this ‘guy’ you’re talking about,” said the voice.
    The intern clutched the phone to his ear and grabbed a coffee-stained notebook.
    “You … you mean you know someone who’s seen the murder victim? Does he know who it is, can he identify the man, is it someone from Falun?”
    “Well, I
really
have no intention of going into any details, but you can think of it as a tip in case you’re entrusted with writing more about this in the future. I have a friend, a
close
friend, who happens to be a
pathologist
at Falu Hospital. And from what he’s said about the autopsy of the ‘guy,’ this case is totally unique. Or more accurately: The case is
almost
unique.”
    “I don’t really understand what you mean.”
    “Vitriol,” said the voice.
    “Sorry?”
    “Copper vitriol.”
    The intern wrote down the words, circled them, and added three question marks.
    “Copper vitriol, you said … ?”
    “You’re not even from Dalarna, huh?” the voice said and hung up.
    When the news director came back in from the balcony, the intern was still holding the silent phone.
    “So what was it about?”
    “It was some reader who wanted to talk about copper,” said the intern.
    “They’re fucking nuts, the whole lot, everyone who calls.”
    “So I … ?”
    “You’ve started off with this story, so now handle it.”
    T he first thing the intern did when he returned to his office was try for about the hundredth time to get hold of Erik Hall.
    The picture of the diver was all over the Internet now, and every Swedish journalist seemed to have gotten an interview.
    Then, on the fifth